Realizer: The prototype presentation app (First impressions)
Billed as a prototype presentation app, Realizer (developed in tandem by Rethink Canada and Nascent Digital) pretty much comes as advertised, with a couple of minor caveats. Simply put, Realizer is a tool that helps iOS devs better "realize" their app ideas by providing a simple, straight-forward platform to upload and link prototype sketches, wireframes, or even fully developed photoshop mockups for presentation on an iPhone or iPad. Although I've admittedly only spent a short time playing around with it, I can confidently say that Realizer will be a tool that I'll be coming back to on a regular basis for my future iOS prototyping needs.
The bulk of Realizer's firepower (and where you'll spend most of your time) is actually via a simple little web app, with only a small companion app install required to view your presentations on an iDevice. The first thing you'll see upon landing, is the standard issue, register or login affair. Signup is essentially pain-free, only requiring your email address and a password. No confirmation emails, no opt-outs, marketing, etc. You sign-up, and are immediately tossed into the site's main interface. Nice! From here, things thankfully don't get a whole lot more complex, and the entirety of the whole experience goes a little something like this:
01. Upload your screen images/wireframes
02. Open each image and draw boxes to specify a desired "hit-zones"(Draw as many as you need)
03. Select the corresponding screen you wish to link to via drop-down menu
04. Save & Exit
05. Wash. Rince. Repeat.
Once you're satisfied that all of your screen images have been uploaded and appropriately linked to one another, simply fire up the sister app on your iDevice and you're good to go. No fiddling with goofy settings, no waiting for your presentation to download. You're done, all of those hit-zones you'd speced earlier can now be tapped to bounce you from one screen to the next, giving you a great idea of how your app UI will flow, and straight-up expose any particularly bad design gaffes you may have made along the way. Need to make some minor adjustments? Fire the web app back up, and go to town. Your changes will be reflected next time you fire up the iDevice app. There-in lies the beauty of this little app. It essentially allows you to very quickly assemble all of the various screens for a potential app idea into a cohesive, fully integrated presentation that you can preview on an actual device.
At this point, I suppose I should mention what Realizer is not: A wireframing app. There are no tools included here to actually build out, or sketch indivudual screens, so you'll have to create these with another app prior to assembling a presentation with Realizer. (I recommend checking out iMockups by Endloopstudios on iPad, or Omnigraffle if you're of the hardcore UX persuasion.) The nice thing about Realizer however, is that it doesn't particularly care what you actually upload as your screens as long as they're JPGs with appropriate pixel dimensions, you're good to go. Hell, if you wanted to sketch your wires out by hand on the back of a napkin and scan them in you could.
As much as I'm on-board with Realizer in a big way, it's not without a handful of minor shortcomings. None of these are deal-breakers, and I suspect that more than a couple of them will factor into some sort of monetization stragety down the road. The current app can be had for the paltry sum of free, so I hardly think I'd be going out on too much of a limb to suggest the developer may choose to address these shortcomings as premium, paid content upgrades at some point.
Everyone knows that you typically get what you pay for, but fortunately for prospective iOS developers, Realizer offers up one of the quickest, easiest ways to prototype an app idea, and present it on an actual iDevice... For free. I'll note a handful of plusses/minuses below, but considering just how quick and painless the current, free experience is, I look forward to what Rethink/Nascent have in store down the road. A great app, that'll surely be a staple in my development toolkit for the foreseeable future.
HITS:- Price: Free!
- Super simple, painless registration process. No opt-outs, no confirmation emails.
- Dead-simple UI with only two major functions. Upload a screen, Add some links. The quickest way to preview an iOS app idea directly on a device.
- Instant updates. Changes made to your presentation in the web app are immediately reflected when you re-launch the iOS, presentation app.
- Upload and link together any type of visual. Napkin sketch, wireframe or a polished mockup... It's upto you.
MISSES:
- Currently lacks support for landscape mode. Although a "coming soon" message is comfortingly displayed.
- No support for retina display. If you're using polished photoshop mockups, they won't look so hot on your iPhone 4.
- When viewing presentations on a device, transitions from one screen to another are a little sluggish. 1-2 seconds.
- No transitional animations in presentation mode. It'd be nice to invoke the default iOS "slide" anims when moving from screen to screen in presentation mode.
- No support for any functionality other than tapping in presentation mode. Being able to place a dropdown menu, picker, or other common iOS nav bits would be nice.
LINKS:
http://www.realizerapp.com
http://www.rethinkcanada.com
http://www.nascentdigital.com
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